Kurt Vonnegut

MARC LEEDS the author of The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium (1994) and the coeditor of The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays (1996), both available from Greenwood Press.PETER J. REED is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Writers for the 70s: Kurt Vonnegut (1972), the first full-length study of the work of Kurt Vonnegut. Since then, he has written many essays on Vonnegut. He is the author of The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut (1997) and the coeditor of The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays (1996), both available from Greenwood Press.

Since the publication of his first short stories in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut has enjoyed much popular acclaim and has, since the 1970s, gained growing amounts of attention from the scholarly community. In the course of his career, he has become increasingly concerned with visual images. While such imagery occurs in his short fiction and novels, he has also written plays, in which ideas are visually represented on the stage. In recent years, he has devoted more and more of his time and energy to graphic art, producing paintings that are then silk screened. The contributors to this volume look at the visual images created by Vonnegut in his literary art, along with the images and representations of his thought that increasingly are being brought to life in other media.Much of Vonnegut's present significance, his talents as a mythmaker, and his impulse toward visual imagery were anticipated by Leslie Fiedler in The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut, published in the September 1970 issue of Esquire. That essay is reprinted here as a prescient introduction to the volume. The essays that follow look at comic elements in Vonnegut's science fiction, the representation of authors in his works, and the translation of his writings into film. The book also examines Vonnegut's graphic art and includes photos of several of his works.

Contributors discuss literary images and representations in Vonnegut's writings, and graphic art and representations of his ideas in various media, such as film.

IntroductionThe Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut by Leslie A. FielderHurting 'til It Laughs by Peter J. ReedIt's All Play-Acting by Michelle PersellThe Paradox of Awareness and Language in Vonnegut's Fiction by Loree RackstrawKurt Vonnegut's Bitter Fool: Kilgore Trout by Peter J. ReedMother Night: Who's Pretending by Marc LeedsMother Night: Fiction into Film by Jerome KlinkowitwVonnegut on Film by Jerry HoltThe Morning after Mother Night by Robert B. WeideThe Boys of Mother Night by Nancy KaptianoffPilgrim's Process by Eric SimensonIn Search of Slaughterhouse-Five by Julie A. HibbardUnstuck in Time: Simultaneity as a Foundation for Vonnegut's Chrono-Synclastic Infundiula and Other Nonlinear Time Structures by Sharon SieberThe Apotheosis of Philanthropy: Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Donald E. MorseKurt and Joe: The Artistic Collaboration of Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Petro III by John Dinsmore and Ollie LyonGraphics by Kurt Vonnegut by Peter J. ReedIndex